The Duality Of Balanced Leadership

From the leadership positions I’ve held, I’ve learned that folks generally relate to one or the other end of the leadership spectrum: either viewing the leader as one who commands and motivates from a distance, or as one who serves as an up close and personal coach. But I would say neither presents a complete view.

Outstanding leadership finds a way to integrate both perspectives. People being led need to have a sense of the direction, vision, context, and goal for whatever is to be achieved. At the same time, certainly in a business like ours where there’s a lot of intellectual property and scope for creativity, we need people to be self-starting and self-orienting, and therefore coaching, mentoring, and the leader’s own personal example are extremely important.

Exceptional leaders operate in these dual ways through a combination of personal qualities that align well with both approaches. Visible confidence matched with genuine humility allows a leader to step out in front and supply the vision, context, and decision making, while at the same time seeing himself or herself as supporting the growth and development of those being led.

All this relates to another duality leaders encounter: A leader can get the time frame wrong. What I mean by that is, if a leader is all about today but not about the future, then a business will get a well-tuned operation but may not be moving toward its greatest potential over the long haul.

Flip side, a leader who’s all about tomorrow but doesn’t pay enough attention to execution today may have trouble getting to the future—not because good vision is absent but for lack of performance in real time to sustain the organization and its leader as head of the organization.

Leadership that has one foot firmly planted in today and one foot firmly planted well into the future—and balances both in real time—is good leadership.

I’ll add another duality. In crisis situations, leaders may make a mistake caused by the desire to behave responsibly. I’m referring here to what I call a loose/tight form of leadership. The loose part describes the following common scenario: In the normal course of running a business, a leader is not particularly close to the work of the people being led. As the leader, in this scenario, I’m not that involved with you. I’m not part of what you’re doing in the area of our business that you’re responsible for. We’ve set our plans, we’ve established the points on the calendar when we’ll get together, and other than that, I’m leaving you to your tasks.